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Comment by alienbeast | Hacker News Reader

OP never said anything about pedophilia, just incest between consenting adults. I guess you proved his point.

Most incest happening in the world is not done between consenting adults. It is done through rape of children. Leaving that out may be construed as a way to shift of the overton window on incest.

You can, of course, point to reliable statistics on that, collected and analyzed using defensible methods. Right?

I suspect that you are wrong, and that most incest happens between same-age adolescent or young adult siblings (and even more between cousins if you count cousins). But I don't have any actual data to back that up either, and would be amazed if any worthwhile data even exist.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teens

34% of reported sexual assault on children take place by family members.

... which has exactly zero bearing on the question.

Let me make sure I got this right... I make a statement about how a lot of incest is due to rape. You cannot fathom that and ask for stats. I provide them from a child abuse organization that also links to the underlying government statistics. You respond with it's irrelevant. You are not arguing in good faith.

The word you used was "most", not "a lot".

Even "a lot" could reasonably be treated as having been a statement about the proportion, but it would not have been a precise enough statement to argue about. And "a lot" could also be treated as talking about an absolute number, in which case the question of whether something was "a lot" would be a total matter of personal opinion.

"Most", on the other hand, has a very clear meaning in terms of relative numbers... which that RAINN link does nothing to support.

"Arguing in good faith" includes not trying to quietly rewrite your position in the middle.

Even now you refuse to engage on my original position. My original position was that leaving out the very real issue of rape when it comes to incest could be construed as trying to move the overton window. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word most, but instead, at least 1/3 of all reported child abuse is done by family. This stat should easily backup my original position that incest and rape are intrinsically linked. You cannot ignore this when discussing incest on the internet.

At least some percentage of all sex is rape, so by your, um, logic, the two are "intrinsically linked", and mentioning sex without bringing up rape is trying to move the Overton window.

AND the original post explicitly limited the field to adults. So even that had already been dealt with.

You are operating in the proud rhetorical tradition that calls all LGBT people "groomers"... and I'm done with you.

Apologies if you find my rhetoric to be like that and I will attempt to speak with more clarity in the future. I would never assume that LGBT people are groomers. My reading of the OP's statement didn't explicitly limit the field to adults. Maybe on this topic, I am skewed by my personal experience. I have several friends who were raped by family members and that trauma has seriously scarred them. The number is high enough for me not to trust others engaging in pro-incest rhetoric as I know exactly zero people engaged in consensual incest. One might say that is because it is taboo to talk about... I don't have a good response to that. I imagine that our actual views on this topic are more in line than what is appearing in this thread. I do not have any issue with consenting adults of sound mind engaging in victimless activities of their choosing. This does get muddied by issue of pregnancy though.

> as I know exactly zero people engaged in consensual incest

And why, pray, should they come out only to face unfounded accusations of rape and child abuse?

> The word you used was "most", not "a lot".

You missed that it's a totally different statistic. Even if it was 100% of reported sexual assault on children is by family members, it could still be that incest between consenting adults is more common.

“A large proportion of pedophilic relationships is incestual” is not the same as “a large proportion of incestual relationships is pedophilic”

This proves much of sexual assault is incest, not that much of incest is sexual assault.

You don't need data. A dictionary will cover it.

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